On GOP prospects the wisdom conventionalComes down to a contest that’s just two-dimensional.Cruz versus Rubio’s the fight that is beckoning.As for Trump once again on his end they are reckoning.

As Iowa approaches,Ted Cruz’ lead in one poll provides renewed predictions of the imminent downfall of Donald Trump. And the implications of this, we are told, are that the eventual contest will be the insurgent Cruz versus the Establishment favorite, Rubio.

For myself I’m reluctant to join the predictors. My April 2, 2015. blog on Cruz included this rhyme:

No need for you to panic for the chance is rather slimThe pundits all declare that this is not the year for him.Yet I wouldn’t be complacent, he has time enough to waitFor the race in twenty-twenty, twent-four and twenty-eight.

But here he is, sufficiently plausible to catch the attention of the

professional satirists for twenty-sixteen. In Trudeau’s Doonesbury Cruz is asked by Fox News to respond to an alleged Trump slur that he is “exactly like Joe McCarthy”, to which Cruz responds: “So what’s the slur?” And Andy Borowitz invents a study proving that the “average American can stand four seconds of Ted Cruz.”

Yet this new, dismal focus on Cruz has not yet dimmed the interest in the Republican Party’s great gift to satirists. So Trudeau has Trump bloviating about his GOP rivals as ugly and weak, one a possible pervert, another, being dark-skinned, even a terrorist. And Borowitz proposes that Trump, far from being embarrassed by an Al Qaeda affiliate’s propaganda video citing his alleged hostility to Muslims, boasts that it would be the highest-rated terror video ever.

Breathlessly we await the revised flood of punditry after the Iowa voting. And after New Hampshire. All the way perhaps to (and including?) the Republican convention.

Posted on Tuesday, January 05, 2016 (Archive on Monday, October 01, 2018)